Creating an automated experience customers love
October 4, 2019
October 4, 2019
Implementing Applied Customer Engagement+ across all channels and touchpoints takes time, but real progress can be achieved in the near term. Start with a strategy to help in prioritizing impact, feasibility and desirability—and use that strategy to identify both quick wins and longer-term strategic priorities.
Whether implementing a new intelligent agent or a full customer engagement platform, don’t try to cover every possible interaction. Stand up an agent that’s trained to address a discrete number of customer needs on a select set of digital properties. Prove the concept in terms of the utility—enhancing the AI’s training while also building the organization’s own capacity for successfully managing such initiatives.
For many organizations, AI-powered customer engagement will progress through three major stages:
How would Applied Customer Engagement+ affect interactions? We map the potential impacts in the shift from anticipating to assisting to advising with the help of AI.
A look at how Applied Customer Engagement+ would affect interactions
ANTICIPATE AI -> Customer |
ASSIST Customer <-> AI |
ADVISE Customer <-> Agent <-> AI |
|
---|---|---|---|
INFORM | Proactive Informational Initiation | Customer Knowledge Prompting | Agent Knowledge Prompting |
Informational | AI proactively pushes information to customer | AI help requested by customer to gather information | AI pushes or agent pulls information during an interaction with a customer |
INTERVENE | Proactive Service Resolution | Customer Transaction Assistance | Agent Service Support |
Transactional | AI proactively helps a customer start or finish a task(service resolution) | AI help requested by customer to complete an action (transactional chatbot) | AI provides help in completing an action to agent during an interaction with a customer |
INTERPRET | Proactive Interaction | Customer Support Escalation | Agent Coaching |
Deep Learning | AI recognizes patterns in customer activity and reaches out about potential issues or opportunities | AI escalates to agent based on sentiment analysis, pattern recognition, and contextual data from a user profile within an existing conversation | AI advises on how to interact with customer, including recommending phrases to use |
Technology in the workplace affects workers on every level. Today’s employees can leverage the latest technologies to reinvent existing roles and find new, innovative ways to adapt and thrive in the post-digital era. And while much of the conversation about AI has been about the threat of eliminating jobs, in reality, AI empowers workers to become what Accenture calls “human+.”
When it comes to customer service, federal organizations can use AI to make everyone “superhuman”:
AI-enabled customer service and customer experience tools are evolving quickly, offering commercial and government organizations unprecedented opportunities to reshape engagement.
While the opportunities are vast, the first steps can be straightforward. Start with a holistic strategy and business case. Focus on areas that will deliver the greatest value and/or be the most expeditious to automate. Then use momentum from those implementations to extend and expand quickly—transforming how the organization engages with customers and delivers mission outcomes.
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